Lex Terrae 800 Years on: The Magna Carta’s Legacy Today
I am grateful for the chance to join such distinguished company to discuss the legacy of the Magna Carta and the 800 Year Struggle for Human Liberty, but I may perhaps open with a quibble. When I told my wife that I had been invited to help commemorate the anniversary of Magna Carta she told me: “Well, take care you do not over-commemorate it.” She had a point. For all its symbolic importance, the Magna Carta was really only one early step toward what at long last, and after long struggle, culminated in such milestones of human liberty as the Declaration of Independence and the Nuremberg Trials. The concept of individual rights as we understand it is hardly to be found in the Magna Carta, and the guarantees it provided were not initially available to all Englishmen, let alone all humanity.It was aimed only at protecting the aristocracy and its privileges against royal interference. The Magna Carta is one of the “charters of liberty granted by power,” that according to James Madison was superseded by American Revolution and its novus ordo seclorum.
While we should here give measured praise to the Magna Carta as the great-great-grandfather of the American Constitution, we should not lose sight of its shortcomings and the ways the generation of 1776 improved on its precedent.The Magna Carta was an important step toward a jurisprudence of freedom—one improved by the American Revolution, and which today’s legal profession has, alas, largely abandoned.
